DACRE’S WAR
For Marie
This edition first published in hardback in Great Britain in 2015 by
Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd
West Newington House
10 Newington Road
Edinburgh
EH9 1QS
www.polygonbooks.co.uk
ISBN: 978 1 84967 311 6
eISBN: 978 0 85790 851 3
Copyright © Rosemary Goring, 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.
The moral right of Rosemary Goring to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
The publisher acknowledge investment from Creative Scotland
towards the publication of this volume
Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
CONTENTS
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Part Two
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Part Three
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Characters
THE SCOTTISH COURT
John Stewart, Duke of Albany, cousin of James IV and Regent of Scotland
Margaret Tudor, the dowager queen, widow of James IV
James V, only surviving son of James IV and Margaret Tudor
Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus, Margaret Tudor’s second husband
James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, one of Margaret Tudor’s strongest allies, enemy of her husband
Alexander Montgomerie, Earl of Eglinton, privy councillor and guardian of the infant king James
John Stewart, Earl of Lennox, a staunch defender of James
William Herries, Lord Herries of Terregles, son of Andrew who died at Flodden
David Forsyth, cousin of Archibald Douglas
THE ENGLISH COURT
Henry VIII, King of England and brother of Margaret, Dowager Queen of Scotland
Thomas Wolsey, Cardinal, Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor, one of Henry’s closest advisers
Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, soldier; son of Thomas Howard, veteran of the battle of Flodden, second earl of Surrey, and now Duke of Norfolk (Surrey takes his father’s title on Norfolk’s death In may 1524)
Sir William Eure, Vice Warden of the English marches
THE CROZIERS
Adam Crozier, head of the clan
Louise Brenier, his wife
Tom Crozier, his younger brother
Old Crozier, Adam and Tom’s grandfather
Hob, head stableboy and groom
Benoit Brenier, Louise’s carpenter brother
Ella Aylewood, Benoit’s wife
Wat the Wanderer, Adam’s cousin and henchman
Murdo Montgomery, Adam’s cousin and henchman
Samuel Jardine, clan chief, and ally of the Croziers
Mitchell Bell, head of local clan, and ally
Father Walsh, the village priest
Oliver Barton, sailor, and cousin of Louise
The wolf, the family dog, born of the late vixen
THE DACRES AND THEIR HOUSEHOLD AND ASSOCIATES
Thomas, Baron Dacre, Warden General of the English marches
Bess, his late wife Elizabeth Greystoke
Blackbird, Dacre’s butler and personal attendant
Sir Christopher Dacre, his brother
Sir Philip Dacre, his brother
Joan Dacre, his youngest daughter
Mabel, his married eldest daughter
Anne, his married middle daughter
Mary, Joan’s maid and companion
Ethan Elliot, thief and reiver
Edward Elliot, his son
Sly Armstrong, outlaw leader of the Liddesdale Armstrongs
Black Ned, Sly’s cousin, leader of the Tynedale Armstrongs
Epigraph
For me, the ransom of my bold attempt
Shall be this cold corpse on the earth’s cold face
Richard III, Act V, Scene 3
PROLOGUE
10 September 1513, the day after the battle of Flodden
He picked his way over the hillside beneath a fog of heavy rain. The turf was strewn with sodden flags and toppled guns, abandoned swords and quivers. His boots slipped on mud made oily with blood, but the soldier who had brought him the news moved swiftly, as if untroubled by the scene. Dacre, after little sleep, and even less to eat, felt his stomach slop. He gripped his staff, and trudged on. Overnight the battlefield had been partially cleared, hundreds of corpses carried off on drays to await the lime pit and dead horses dragged to the valley top, where their stookie limbs prodded the sky, pyres of flesh awaiting the flame. Only at the foot of the slopes, where bodies were half buried in glaur, was the carnage untouched. The river washed on around them, turning a hand or shuddering a leg, as if the owner had been merely asleep and now was roused at last.
‘He’s over here,’ said the soldier, calling the baron’s attention to a hollow near the top of the hill, where they were heading. Some distance behind him, cloaked in rain, Dacre moved at the speed of one reluctant to reach his destination. When he did, gulls were mewling high overhead, a sound he would ever after think of as a lament for the sorry figure they circled.
The king’s body had been turned upwards, though beneath the black crust of a face savaged by sword and arrow and axe few would have recognised him. His chain mail coat was torn, and around his shoulders the mantle bearing his coat of arms lay in shreds, its lion slain. His helmet was trodden into the earth by his side, where his standard bearer lay, the boy fallen upon the Scottish flag, now stained with his dying.
The baron barely noticed him, looking only at James. Crouching by the side of his old enemy he wrenched an arrow out of his neck and hurled it aside. For a moment, mist clouded his vision. He rubbed his face, and the king came back into sight. Dacre lifted an ungloved hand, almost severed from its wrist, and saw the marks where night-time scavengers had removed the rings. He laid it down, as
one would a sleeping child’s.
Raising the metal tunic, he found the proof he needed. The Warden General of the English marches, whose soldiers had helped bring about the Scots’ defeat, lowered his head in sorrow. There could be no doubt. The king’s iron belt was locked around his waist, chafing purple on clay-coloured skin. Dacre counted the links, and found one for every year since the death of James’s father, in whose memory he wore it.
With a long sigh, he got to his feet. ‘This is him, James IV, King of Scotland no longer. You’ve done well to find him. Had he gone missing, rumours would have kept him alive for years.’
He straightened, and put a hand to the small of his back as he stared into the downpour. Beyond the rain lay the sea. He could smell it. So could the gulls, and as if reminded of where they belonged they gave a last call and flew off.
Later, Dacre marched back to the village, ahead of the pall-bearers. ‘Get back!’ he shouted, as a crowd gathered, jostling for a glimpse of the stricken king. ‘It’s only another body, like the thousands ye have already seen. Are ye no sick of the sight by now?’ He raised his staff to clear the way, but he understood why they peered. How often would they see a king brought lower than they?
Dacre shouldered past them. James had been his enemy, but also a friend, a man who could be trusted. The same could not be said of his own king. Brushing rain out of his eyes, the Warden General thanked the saints that Henry never ventured this far north. Should he ever show any interest in the borderlands, it would bode as ill for Dacre as for the Scots.
Part One
1523
Foul Deeds Will Rise Again
CHAPTER ONE
March 1523
From the crown of a grizzled oak, a buzzard blinked as three men rode out of the woods and onto the empty hills. Hunched as a tax collector counting his coins, the bird did not shift from its perch but kept the riders in its sights as they moved steadily across the valley. Only when they had reached the farthermost peak did the glint of helmets and swords disappear, leaving the moorland quiet in their wake. Watchful still, the buzzard scraped its beak and refolded its wings. These men had passed this way often before. They would no doubt soon return.
The threesome rode abreast, bridles chattering. Their dark garb brightened only by steel, they did not speak but cantered over turf and moss, scattering white cattle and goats as they moved west. Adam Crozier’s horse was a short head in front, setting the pace and finding the path. The borderer’s eyes were fixed on the track, and none would have guessed that his thoughts were not of the assignation that lay ahead, but of the past that raced to meet him at every bend of river and curve of hill.
He had trodden this land since he was a child, and would have known it blindfold: bridlepaths overgrown with wild garlic; river pools where moorhens paddled between soft-scented water lilies or scuttled, chittering, onto the bank; and everywhere the dry, warm scent of beech, hazel and oak, under whose canopy a boy could make a hideaway from branches and bracken as comfortable as anything a stonemason could devise.
Teviotdale was Crozier’s domain, the sweetest nut in the borderlands. A cradle of gentle hills and loamy plains, a sparrow’s flight from the English border, it was well hidden from the eye of the authorities in Edinburgh. Here, in his youth, crops had grown lush under a fitful sun, and animals had grazed, fearing nothing but the wolf. To look at the hillsides and pastures now, where grain barns were as fortified as castles, and livestock were herded each night into byres only a cannon could breach, such a time seemed as distant as the myths bards sang of when they plucked their lyres on feast days.
The riders slowed as the hillside turned to ash, and their horses picked their way over grasslands charred by flame. The borderer’s face tightened. His mare skirted the wooden stumps of a hamlet whose cottages had been fired to dust. Barely twenty miles from Crozier’s Keep, he reflected, and the countryside was fast becoming wasteland, so often was it scathed by the gangs who roamed these parts. Soon there would be nothing left for them to steal or destroy. Even then it was unlikely the dalesfolk would be left in peace.
That he and his men were on their way to meet Ethan Elliot, one of the most audacious thieves and ruthless killers this side of Carlisle, made the desolation even more bitter. In his time, Elliot had ravaged the middle march as if it were enemy land and not that of his neighbours. In the Crozier household his name was spoken rarely, and then in whispers, for fear of invoking the evil spirits that none doubted the man harboured or had at his command. For few knew better than they what he was capable of.
In these parts it was commonly believed that it was Elliot who had murdered Crozier’s father, when Adam was still a boy. There was no proof, but few doubted it was true. Had he not been so intent these past few years in restoring his family’s fortunes, he might have taken revenge, but the condition of his lands, his people, and of the country itself after Flodden, left little room for such an indulgence. Until he reclaimed the honour of his family name – lost long before that fateful battle – and with it their rightful place as leaders of the middle march, he had no spare thought for the man so reviled that they called him the Leper of Liddesdale. If he did not carry the disease himself, he spread a pestilence wherever he went that was almost as disfiguring.
Glad to put the fired earth behind them, the three quickened their pace. Tom Crozier brushed alongside his brother’s horse as they negotiated a narrow trail at the head of a gully and indicated the path wending south. ‘See, the prints are fresh. They’ve been here this past day or so, since it last rained. I reckon they’re lying in wait ahead of us.’
‘Who, Dacre’s men?’ asked their companion. Wat the Wanderer’s skill with the crossbow he carried on his back made more powerful men pause before risking his wrath. ‘Unlikely. This season, the Deadwater Marshes would swamp them. If the Warden General is headed into the dale, it’ll be by a higher route than the causeway, and we’d have heard of it.’
Tom did not look convinced. ‘I don’t trust Elliot,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if we’re riding into an ambush. And who better for him to summon to finish us off than his paymaster, who can get here in a day by this route, and scarper in half that time?’ His eyes gleamed at the prospect.
Crozier gathered the reins in one hand. ‘Could be you’re right,’ was all he said, urging his horse up the slope.
There was a poor crop of honesty when Ethan Elliot was born. In its place was a cunning so deep that as he grew from boy to man it appeared to ooze from his pores, slicking his hair, dampening his palms, and giving him an oily sheen that matched his slippery eye. Crozier had never met him – by the time he found his father’s corpse, the murderer and his cronies were gone. Yet when, a week earlier, Elliot’s youngest son had arrived at Crozier’s Keep bearing a message, the borderer had looked into the boy’s defiant face and fancied he found reflected in it a glimmer of the man who had brought his family to its knees.
Edward Elliot had knocked at the gates with a club, leaving his companions at the edge of the woods with their horses. A sentry had stripped him of cudgel, sword, dagger and knife, and left him to await his master in the guardroom. Uneasy in the enemy’s camp, black forelock drooping over one eye, he wrung his greasy woollen cap in his hands under the stare of the watchmen who were waiting their turn on the walls.
His father had told him to expect little more than a farmer’s house, but it was clear the old man had not seen the place in years. As he approached, thick outer walls towered over him until he felt like an ant at the foot of a tree. Once through the main gates, an inner wall guarded the keep, whose ramparts and stonework were so immaculately kept one would have thought them newly built, had not the stories of the keep’s long history, and Crozier’s battles, carried through all the borders. When finally the clan chief and his brother entered the guardroom, the young man’s face revealed a temper as overstrung as a new harp. He had been left idle all morning, but the thought of his father’s anger if he did not delive
r his message had kept him there.
With a look, Crozier sent the guards out, then closed the door and leaned against it. He was not a tall man, but he filled the room. Edward Elliot was ashamed of the tightness of his throat, the prickle of heat in his hands. ‘I am sent to you by my father, Ethan Elliot,’ he said loudly. ‘He requests a meeting with you. He says it is urgent. He must speak to you, and will accept whatever time and place you like, so long as it is soon.’ He felt more foolish yet as the words fell onto silence.
Crozier looked at Tom, and back at Edward, who swallowed hard. In that space, all three heard it. There was a long pause. ‘Is that so?’ the borderer said at last. He took a step towards Edward, who forced himself not to move. ‘You are too young to remember, lad, but your father’s last visit to this place made him, and now you, the least welcome guests we have ever had.’
Edward raised his eyes to meet Crozier’s. His heartbeat quickened, but for his father he would face down any threat, and not merely for fear of his rage. ‘He said you would not believe me, nor trust him, and he asked me to give you a pledge of his honour.’ He placed a small gold ring in Crozier’s hand. ‘If ye take a good look, you’ll see his and my mother’s initials, and the date of their betrothal. It is her wedding band, and since Ma’s death it is his most precious possession.’
Crozier handed it back without a glance. ‘I need no pledge, lad. Your father’s word is worthless. Yet I am curious to know what he has to tell me.’ He looked up at the arched bricks above their heads, as if searching for an answer. Tom licked his lips, a gesture of anticipation, not fear, and Crozier was pleased. Both of them thought alike.
‘Very well,’ he said, looking at Edward, ‘you can go back to Ethan Elliot and tell him that I and my men will meet him a week from today, on Blinkbonny Hill on the Overstone Pass. We shall find him at noon, but he must come with none other than you, nor try to trick or deceive us, or he shall dig his own grave on that hill.’ He opened the door, and a sentry appeared to lead the young man back to the gates.
Edward was cantering home with his cousins, breathing deep with relief to be free of the keep, before he realised he had dropped his cap in the guardroom. By then, it was on the sentry’s brazier, sizzling with sweat yet barely singed, as if even the flames were reluctant to touch anything that belonged to an Elliot.
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